El Santo :

Forbidden World is great. Completely unpretentious and completely unrepentent, it’s a fine example of why, when you wanted something ripped off right in the 70’s and early 80’s, the smart thing to do was to go straight to Roger Corman and New World Pictures.

Heh, well that’s a glowing endorsement if I ever heard one. I’ll definitely check it out.

And I forgot to mention it earlier, but I, too, am a fan of the Sandy Frank dubs for the Gamera films. Though that may be because they’re the only ones I’ve ever actually seen.

MatthewF :
Or, as my wife would say, you’re a grown man and this is a film about a giant jet propelled turtle and you were expecting it to be good?

The Shusuke Kaneko trilogy of Gamera films proves that it is perfectly valid to answer that question with, “Yes.”

Man, if I can afford it, Shout Factory will be getting a lot of my money this year. I’ll finally be able to get Piranha since I missed it before, the Showa Gamera films, and I’m even halfway tempted to trade in my copy of Humanoids From The Deep for the one they’re releasing.

I kind of hope they’ll be releasing Galaxy of Terror and Forbidden World as a double feature disc because I’ve always been curious about the latter and my inexplicable affection for the former guarantees I’ll be buying it.

Much like the rest of the movie, come to think of it.

Bear in mind, though, I haven’t seen the flick for better than a decade. And that half the time I watch a Gamera flick these days I wonder what the appeal was for me as a kid.

(Which, incidentally, won’t stop me from buying the movies. Remastered rather than the crap copies I got? I’m in. So in.)

I mean, hell, I own Yonggary/Reptilian and Kraa the Sea Monster. It’s not worse than those, right?

I’d finally get to see vs. Jiger! That’d be great.

No. No, it won’t.

I honestly prefer the staggeringly lousy Sandy Frank dubs

As I recall, the Frank dubs are actually surprisingly close to literal translations of the originals. I remember being stunned that “This is what we scientists call a ‘Death Ray Projector’” was actually in the original of Gaos (and come to think of it, my other favorite line — “Let’s just call it a monster!” — isn’t too far off, either). My impression is that AIP tried to make sense of the scripts, while Frank just took them at face value and executed them really badly.

does that mean they’re paying people to take the disc?

Considering how much re-used footage there is in the other Showa flicks, adding Gamera: Super Monster to the set really is overkill. I wish they’d include the reconstructed footage from Gamera vs. Garasharp instead.

(Don’t mind me. My big fear is that it’ll be a collection, meaning I’m going to have to add buying/owning Gamera: Super Monster to my list of shame. Right up there with two copies of Godzilla vs. Megalon and two of the Dracula vs. Frankenstein (Collect all three!))